Katrina
Aftermath: Capitalist Land Grab
Black People Flooded Out, Now Kept Out

Louisiana
state police SWAT team drives past flood victims still trapped in New
Orleans September 1, days after hurricane struck. (Eric Gay/AP)

The
ravaging of New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina has deeply
shocked the
country and the world. What horrified people was not the raw force of
nature
but the proof of a man-made disaster. What they saw through the
television lens
was a monstrous crime, racist mass murder carried out by the rulers of
capitalist America against the downtrodden that they exploit and
oppress. By
now everyone knows that 100,000 people, overwhelmingly black and poor,
were
left to die in the “New Orleans Death Trap”: the levees that
authorities knew
couldn’t handle a big storm but weren’t repaired because the money went
to the
war on Iraq; the patients trapped in public hospitals without supplies
while
those in private hospitals were taken out by helicopter; the
“evacuation” that
provided no transportation for those without cars and money. The
evidence is
irrefutable that race and class determined who escaped and who didn’t,
who
lived and who perished there from drowning, starvation and unbearable
heat. The
images of bodies floating in the flood waters for two weeks with no one
picking
them up are now seared into the collective memory. Together with the
harrowing
photos of the torture and sexual degradation of prisoners by their
American
jailers at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, these are an unforgettable visual
indictment of the criminal nature of U.S. imperialism. And the
conclusion is just as inescapable: We need a revolution!

Today
the Big Easy is a police-state encampment, occupied by an estimated
14,000
heavily armed government men and their machine guns, patrolled by
military
trucks, “up-armored” Humvees, Black Hawks and Chinooks. The poor and
working
people of New Orleans, black and white, but mainly black, have been
dispersed
across a half-dozen states. In their shelters they are wondering
whether the
government means this diaspora to be temporary, or will it attempt to
bar them
from ever returning to New Orleans. Some may be starting to feel like
the
Palestinians displaced by the Israeli Zionists in 1948 who are still
sitting in
their “temporary” refugee camps today. When the Federal Emergency
Management
Administration (FEMA) tried to stuff them onto cruise ships in the New
Orleans
harbor, flood survivors refused to go aboard. After being locked down
in the
New Orleans Superdome and then the Houston Astrodome, their experience
told
them these would quickly become prison ships. So instead FEMA is
building huge
trailer parks where tens of thousands are to be housed, “temporarily”
of
course. We demand the right to return of every person and family
driven
from New Orleans!

Since
the hurricane every day has brought new revelations about how the
government
systematically prevented doctors, nurses, firefighters and
anyone else
from reaching those marooned in the flooded city, how it blocked ambulances,
helicopters, buses and boats from evacuating the exhausted and dying
from
hospitals and the hellhole collection centers, how “first responders”
were
ordered not to respond and Air Force pilots who heroically survivors
were
reprimanded. Now the bourgeois media are beginning to admit that the
stories
they broadcast and printed about thugs raping and murdering people,
about
rampaging “anarchy” in New Orleans, were wildly exaggerated. At most
there were
a handful of cases. A racist frenzy was whipped up, pure scare
propaganda. But
why? Because the principal objective of the government at all levels –
local,
state but especially federal – was not to rescue the victims but to militarily
occupy the devastated city and put the population under martial law.

New
Orleans cops patrol the city in pick-up trucks and plainclothes like
“technicals” in Somalia, September 4. U.S. officials declared they were
engaged in “combat” against “insurgents,” in order to justify plans for
internal war. (Photo: Marko Georgiev for the New York Times)

The
head of the Pentagon’s National Guard Bureau, Lt.-Gen. Steven Blum,
frankly
stated in a September 3 Defense Department briefing that “we waited
until we
had enough force in place to do an overwhelming force” and that they
“stormed
the convention center” (although he admitted that “there was absolutely
no
opposition”). The general called the whole operation “a great success
story – a
terrific success story.” These were not the demented ravings of a
General Jack
D. Ripper out of the movie Dr. Strangelove but the official
spokesman
for the U.S. military. The units sent into New Orleans were not
search-and-rescue
units but National Guard Military Police, the Army’s 82nd Airborne and
1st
Cavalry divisions and the 1st and 2nd Marine Expeditionary Forces, back
from
Iraq where they “stormed” Baghdad in the 2003 U.S. invasion. Many of
their
tactics were the same in both cities, only here they were engaging in
“combat
operations” (against mythical “insurgents” who put up no resistance) as
part of
a program for internal war.

This
is no exaggeration but a precise description of the plans drawn up by
the
Defense (War) Department long before 11 September 2001, which led to
the
establishment of the U.S. Northern Command. Once fatuously described as
an
“office in search of a mission” (Christian Science Monitor,25
February 2002), NORTHCOM is now larger than the command center for all
U.S.
operations in Latin America (SOUTHCOM). Its mission is to set the stage
for
junking the legal prohibition against using the military to police the
domestic
population, the proscriptions of the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 which
have been
increasingly skirted by Republican and Democratic administrations alike
(as in
the Clinton administration’s murderous 1993 attack on the Branch
Davidian
religious sect in Waco, Texas). The Pentagon used the 9/11 attack on
the World
Trade Center as the pretext for putting Lower Manhattan under martial
law for
weeks. Now in New Orleans the generals have seized the opportunity to
lock down
an entire city indefinitely.

In
his September 15 speech pledging unlimited federal aid to rebuilding
New
Orleans, Bush declared that such a “challenge” “requires greater
federal
authority and a broader role for the armed forces.” As of September 14,
the
U.S. had more than 68,000 troops on the ground or on ships in the New
Orleans
area, a city whose police force totaled a little over 1,500 cops
(two-thirds of
whom have since quit or left town). NBC-TV Nightly News anchor Brian
Williams
reports in his Internet “web log,” or blog:

“It
is impossible to over-emphasize the extent to which this area is under
government occupation, and portions of it under government-enforced
lockdown.
Police cars rule the streets. They (along with Humvees, ambulances,
fire
apparatus, FEMA trucks and all official-looking SUVs) are generally not
stopped
at checkpoints and roadblocks. All other vehicles are subject to long
lines and
snap judgments and must PROVE they have vital business inside the vast
roped-off regions here.”

In addition, mercenary
outfits like Blackwater USA (the “contractors” whose professional
killers in
Iraq were strung up in Falluja in April 2004, leading to Washington’s
decision
to destroy the city), the Steele Foundation (which helped facilitate
the
kidnapping of Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide last year while
ostensibly protecting him) and Wackenhut Security (specialists in
scab-herding)
are protecting the properties of their various capitalist clients.

In
2001, the Bush administration used the 9/11 attack to implement its war
plans
for an invasion of Iraq, preceded by the occupation of Afghanistan, as
well to
implement a battery of police-state repressive laws, all dutifully
voted for by
the Democrats. Now it is using the Katrina hurricane and ensuing flood
of New
Orleans to implement its domestic agenda. No-bid contracts worth
billions have
been handed out to Bush/Cheney cronies such as the Halliburton
Corporation,
notorious for its Iraq war profiteering; the “prevailing wage”
requirements of
the Davis-Bacon Act have been suspended, facilitating the use of
low-wage
non-union companies; requirements for affirmative action plans
facilitating
employment of minorities have been dropped. Mayor Ray Nagin has invited
Wal-Mart to build a superstore. But while big corporations will get
whopping
tax breaks in “opportunity zones,” the impoverished population of the
98
percent black Lower Ninth Ward will not be allowed back into their
houses,
which will probably be bulldozed. As David Banner rapped at an Atlanta
“Heal
the Hood” fundraising benefit, “Bush is giving his homeboys Halliburton
the
rebuilding contracts to our cities....They
been waiting to tear our ghettos down and separate us
from our
land.”

As
usual, this operation is carried out under the pretense of “aiding” the
victims, building better homes than the “shotgun houses” with no
hallways that
were common in poor black neighborhoods of New Orleans. Of course, they
leave
out the little fact that the former residents of Bywater and the Ninth
Ward
won’t be able to afford the new housing. Barbara Bush, matriarch of the
Bush
dynasty, sounded like Marie Antoinette (“Let them eat cake”) when she
visited
hurricane relief centers in Houston. With bourgeois condescension
toward the
newly “homeless” of New Orleans, she remarked:

“What
I’m hearing which is sort of scary is they all want to stay in Texas....And so many of the people in the arena here,
you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this – this (she chuckles
slightly)
is working very well for them.”–Editor
and Publisher, 5 September

In the 1950s and ’60s,
as real estate interests, city hall pols and Washington bureaucrats got
together to tear down inner-city ghettos to replace them with
middle-class
housing, business districts and Interstate highways, protesters chanted
that “urban
renewal is Negro removal.” Today, as U.S. wages its terrorist “war
on
terror,” what we are seeing in New Orleans is “ethnic cleansing”
American-style.
The
not-so-liberal bourgeois media and the Democratic Party, long
intimidated by
the hard-ball conservative politics of the Bush gang, have shown
unaccustomed
gumption over the New Orleans disaster, complaining of the “slow pace”
and
“incompetence” of the Bush response. This is an echo of John Kerry’s
2004 “we
can do better” Democratic presidential campaign. The White House tried
to
dismiss this as a “blame game,” while Bush repeatedly scurried back to
the Gulf
Coast to rescue his presidency. Appealing to common ruling-class
interests, the New York Times (2 September) editorialized:
“America
clearly needs a
larger active-duty Army. It just as clearly needs a homeland-based
National
Guard that’s fully prepared and ready for any domestic emergency.” Yet
for the
dispossessed, it’s not that the Bush regime was too slow in sending in
the 82nd
Airborne, but that the imperialist military – under both of the twin
parties of
U.S. capitalism – exists to serve the rich and powerful, the ruling
class. For
them, the two-thirds black population and working people of New Orleans
are the
enemy. \

FEMA:
“First Responders Urged Not to Respond”

Soldiers examine dead body still lying on New Orleans street September
7, nine
days after hurricane hit city. FEMA privatized collection of corpses,
giving
contract to company that was big Bush campaign contributor. (Photo:Nicole
Bengiveno/New York Times)

As
the first televised news reports of the flooding following Hurricane
Katrina
came out, viewers could not believe what they were seeing. One hundred
thousand
exhausted people were left stranded in New Orleans without sufficient
food and
fresh water to survive. Many were the sick and elderly from nursing
homes and
hospitals; most were the city’s poor and mainly black residents, who
did not
have their own means of leaving town nor a place to go when the mayor
issued
the evacuation order a day and a half before the hurricane hit. As
heart-wrenching scenes were shown day after day and conditions
deteriorated in
the Superdome, called the “shelter of last resort” by Mayor Nagin,
people
asked: Where is the government? Where are the rescuers? Critics are now
accusing the Bush regime of “incompetence” over the “botched rescue
operation.”
The head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), Michael
Brown, has
been dumped as a sacrificial lamb. But the feds weren’t slow to
respond, they
immediately organized a gigantic military operation to keep out all
those who
were attempting to help.

As
a division of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the post-9/11
federal
police superagency, FEMA was intent on locking down New Orleans from
the moment
Katrina hit the Gulf Coast. That very day, August 29, FEMA issued an
ominous
bulletin titled “First Responders Urged Not to Respond to Hurricane
Impact
Areas Unless Dispatched by State, Local Authorities” (available on the
FEMA
Internet site). On September 2, the Red Cross told astonished reporters
that
the “Homeland Security Department has requested and continues to
request that
the American Red Cross not come back into New Orleans.... Right now
access is
controlled by the National Guard and local authorities. We have been at
the
table every single day [asking for access]. We cannot get into New
Orleans
against their orders” (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 3 September).
That didn’t
stop the Red Cross from cashing in on the disaster, however. The
“humanitarian”
agency raised almost three-quarters of a billion dollars in relief aid
although
it had no shelter in New Orleans and refused to build shelters in the
coastal
flood plains.

The
FEMA bulletin and DHS directives discouraged many would-be aid workers
like
those who rushed to the rubble of the World Trade Center on September
11 trying
to pull out survivors. But the Bush regime did far more to keep
rescuers out.
They established a military cordon around New Orleans to make sure no
help
could get through.Take the following
incidents, only a few among many reported in the bourgeois media:

On August
31, a caravan of 1,000 volunteers towing 500 private boats assembled in
Lafayette
at the appeal of a Louisiana state senator and headed toward New
Orleans with a
police escort from the Jefferson Parish sheriff’s department. This
would have
been a formidable flotilla of navigators with years of experience on
Louisiana
waterways. However, according to a participant, when they got off the
Interstate, they found their way blockaded by FEMA. Agents said no boat
over 16
feet would be allowed. They also refused to let the boatmen go to
hospitals to
ferry out patients who were dying there. All 500 were turned back. A
couple who
got through to the launch site of the state Department of Wildlife and
Fisheries (under FEMA command) reported “there were over 200 DWF agents
just
standing around and doing nothing.... FEMA would not let them help”
(reported
on the Securing America web log, 3 September; WNYC radio, 5 September;
and the
Lafayette Daily Advertiser, 12 September).

The Navy
amphibious assault ship USS Bataan, with 1,200 sailors, a fully
equipped
and staffed 600-bed hospital, and capacity to generate plenty of
electricity
and 100,000 gallons of fresh water a day, rode out the storm in the
Gulf of
Mexico and attempted to aid New Orleans as soon as it passed. FEMA
turned the Bataan away (Chicago Tribune, 4 September).

Some
1,400 firefighters from all over the country headed to the Gulf Coast
to help.
But they were corralled by FEMA and sent to Atlanta . . . for public
relations
training. Told that their job would be to shuffle around the region
passing out
fliers telling people to call 1-800-621-FEMA, some peeled off their
FEMA-issued
shirts in disgust. “They’ve got people here who are search-and-rescue
certified, paramedics, haz-mat [hazardous materials] certified,”
complained a
Texas firefighter. One team of 50 firemen did make it to New Orleans,
though.
Their assignment: to stand by President Bush for photo ops as he toured
devastated areas (Salt Lake City Tribune, 12 September).

A highly
trained Houston-area oil-fire-fighting unit tried to deploy to New
Orleans
anyway, but was prevented at gunpoint by FEMA-controlled agents
(participant
report on the liberal Daily Kos weblog, September 5).

The
American Ambulance Association offered to provide 300 emergency
vehicles but
the General Services Administration and FEMA turned them down (Washington
Post, 4 September).

The city
of Chicago offered to send “hundreds of personnel . . . and dozens of
vehicles”
to New Orleans’ aid, but FEMA declined, saying all that was needed from
Chicago
was a single tank truck (Chicago Tribune, 2 September).

Hundreds
of doctors and nurses from far and wide have attempted to aid stricken
New
Orleans residents, only to be turned away by the U.S. government. Among
those
stopped from carrying out their life-saving missions by FEMA gun thugs:
a
113-bed state-of-the art mobile hospital with 100 surgeons and
paramedics
(which drove in a convoy for 30 hours from North Carolina), and a large
medical
team from Georgia with 31 doctors, nurses and paramedics (Atlanta Journal
and Constitution, 5 September).

Even U.S.
military personnel who sought to help people were blocked and punished.
When
two Navy helicopter pilots ferried a hundred or so exhausted and
stranded
people to local hospitals, they were formally reprimanded for these
acts of
compassion and human decency, and reassigned to take care of officers’
pets (New
York Times,7 September).

Aaron
Broussard, president of Jefferson Parish in New Orleans, catalogued the
following incidents of FEMA’s assault on the rescuers on NBC’s Meet
the
Press on September 4: “We had Wal-Mart deliver three trucks of
water,
trailer trucks of water. FEMA turned them back. They said we didn’t
need them.
This was a week ago . . . . we had 1,000 gallons of diesel fuel on a
Coast
Guard vessel docked in my parish. The Coast Guard said, ‘Come get
the
fuel right away.’ When we got there with our trucks, they got a
word.
‘FEMA says don’t give you the fuel.’ Yesterday FEMA comes in and cuts
all of
our emergency communication lines. They cut them without notice.”
Broussard
wept as he told of the death of his friend’s mother, left stranded in a
nursing
home for four days as he desperately pleaded for rescuers.

International
offers of aid have been routinely ignored or rebuffed by the U.S.
government.
Cuba, the world’s most advanced country when it comes to hurricane
response,
has offered to send over a thousand of its highly trained and respected
doctors, each equipped with a specially developed 50-pound hurricane
relief
pack. The State Department refused the offer, and then lied that it was
never
made. The U.S. also refused Venezuela’s offer of gasoline, heating oil,
and
doctors, and Sweden’s offer of thousands of working cell phones so
refugees in
shelters could contact relatives and friends (Democracy Now! WBAI
radio,
September 7).

As
the toll of confirmed dead climbs over 1,000, the fact that at least
154 of the
bodies were recovered in New Orleans hospitals and nursing homes has
caused an
uproar. There may be cases of negligence by individual operators, but
many
doctors, nurses and hospital workers acted heroically to save the
patients. A New
York Times (19 September) investigation showed that in facility
after
facility, the feds turned around or commandeered trucks, buses, boats
and
helicopters that had been sent to aid the patients. Memorial Medical
Center (35
dead): on Day 3, hospital officials were told by Office of Emergency
Preparedness that they were “on their own”; at that point they could
not get
buses or drivers. Methodist Hospital (16 dead): the company which runs
the hospital
contracted two trucks with food, water and fuel – “confiscated by
federal
authorities” – and hired two helicopters – “officials refused to let
them fly.”
Maison Hospitalière (4 dead): “FEMA officials had told drivers
it was too
dangerous to enter.”

Many
of those who died were drowned in the rising waters, after days of
waiting for
promised rescue boats that were never permitted to get near them. Flood
survivors with nowhere else to go were directed by local authorities to
the
Louisiana Superdome and the New Orleans Convention Center. The
thousands who
streamed in from the flooded city slums, through chest-deep oily and
sewage-filled water, were abandoned to their fate. When National Guard
soldiers
arrived they treated the survivors like prisoners and trained their
guns on
them.

After
officials locked down the filled Superdome and Convention Center,
straggling
refugees tried to get out on foot. Many were told to walk to the
Pontchartrain
Expressway and cross the Mississippi River to the West Bank, where they
would
be met by buses. Thousands tried to make this trip, but there were no
buses at
the other side, only a cordon of Gretna sheriffs, who fired volleys
over their
heads. Some set up a camp on the expressway, in the hopes that they
would be
noticed and rescued. At dusk, however, a police chopper used its
backdraft to
blow away the flimsy shelters the refugees had built against the
pouring rain,
while a Gretna sheriff aimed his gun and screamed “Get off the fucking
freeway.” As the frightened flood victims retreated, the sheriff loaded
his
truck with their meager supplies (Larry Bradshaw and Lorrie Beth
Slonsky, New
Orleans Indymedia report, September 7).

“Troops
Begin Combat Operations in New Orleans”

What
would lead local, state and federal authorities to adopt such a
murderous
response toward the surviving victims of a disaster? Gut racism,
certainly,
from sheriffs on the bridges over the Mississippi, or the squads of
heavily
armed white cops and others who cruised through the streets of New
Orleans in
pick-up trucks hunting down black residents. “Ninth Ward n_____rs” were
Texas’
problem now, remarked one caught on a reporter’s tape recorder
(Democracy Now!
September 6), referring to the thousands of evacuees who were
eventually bused
from New Orleans’ Superdome to Houston’s Astrodome. The mood was
captured by
one of the state’s grinning gun thugs, who jokingly told a reporter,
“if you
wanted to kill someone here, this was a good time” (New York Times,
8
September). It has been widely noted (except by Bush’s black front
woman, the
despicable secretary of state Condoleezza Rice) how the callous
disregard for
black lives shown by the government in New Orleans contrasts with their
attitude toward white suburbanites hit by hurricanes in North Carolina
or
Florida.

Torture
in Iraq, bodies floating in New Orleans, images of crimes of U.S.
imperialism.
(Photo courtesy of The New Yorker)

But
there was more to it than a bunch of racist yahoos run amok, much more.
The
deliberate, racist mass murder in New Orleans was official
government
policy coming straight from Republican Bush in the White House and
extending
down to Democratic senator Mary Landrieu, Democratic governor Kathleen
Blanco
and the black Democratic mayor Nagin in New Orleans. The tragic events
of the
last two weeks are a brutal object lesson in the class nature of the
state. As
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote a century and a half ago, “The
executive
of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs
of the
whole bourgeoisie” (The Communist Manifesto [1848]). As Engels
later
spelled it out in his book, The Origins of the Family, Private
Property and
the State (1884), the state consists of a “special, public power”
consisting of “armed men” as well as “prisons, and institutions of
coercion of
all kinds,” by means of which “the economically dominant class ...
becomes also
the politically dominant class, and thus acquires new means of holding
down and
exploiting the oppressed class....”

During
times of slavery, black people by law “had no rights which the white
man was
bound to respect,” as Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger Taney held in
the
infamous 1857 Dred Scott decision which denied that people of African
ancestry
were or ever could be citizens. Today the United States claims to
export
bourgeois “democracy” at gunpoint around the globe, to make the world
safe for
exploitation by ExxonMobil, Halliburton and Citibank. Then and now, the
capitalist state, as a special body of armed men dedicated to “holding
down and
exploiting the oppressed class,” is the enemy of black people and all
poor and
working people. The state of siege in New Orleans is no isolated
episode, but
is closely tied to the U.S. war and occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan.
As we
have repeatedly emphasized, imperialist war abroad means racist
police-state
repression “at home.” The imposition of martial law in New Orleans
and the
removal of its entire population is not an exercise in “emergency
management.”
It is a first taste of long-standing plans by the U.S. bourgeoisie to
“impose
order” in America’s inner cities through preventive internal war
against the
exploited and oppressed.

We
noted in our previous article (“New Orleans Death Trap,” see page 6)
that “the
occupation of New Orleans resembled nothing so much as the U.S.
takeover of
Baghdad” – no accident since it was carried out by some of the same
military
units. Taking their cue from the feds, the makeshift headquarters of
the
notoriously racist and corrupt New Orleans Police Department was
nicknamed the
“Green Zone,” after the fortified HQ area of the U.S. occupiers in the
Iraqi
capital. Outside the Green Zone, whether in Baghdad or New Orleans, the
people
are in the gunsights of the government’s war machine. In Iraq, the
colonial
subjects have yet to be “pacified” – a determined insurgency has
frustrated the
U.S. expeditionary forces and the Iraqi puppet “government” and army.
Fearing
that the endless bloodbath in the Near East could stir unrest in the
U.S., as
occurred in the ghetto upheavals of the late 1960s during the Vietnam
War, the
imperialists have been sent stormtroopers to subdue the minority
population
under the iron heel of martial law. New Orleans is intended as a bloody
lesson
to the rest of us.

The
day before President Bush entered the city, the semi-official Army
Times (2
September) announced that “Troops Begin Combat Operations in New
Orleans.” This
was not just a headline writer’s exaggeration. The article said a
“massive
citywide security mission” had been mounted to “fight the insurgency in
the
city.” The article quoted Brig. Gen. Gary Jones, commander of the
Louisiana
National Guard’s Joint Task Force Katrina, saying: “This place is going
to look
like Little Somalia.... We’re going to go out and take this city back.
This
will be a combat operation to get this city under control.” Take the
city back
. . . from whom, from the hapless and helpless people who were stranded
there?
On the face of it, this is demented. The supposed “insurgency” consists
of a
couple of potshots against helicopters. The reports of rampaging murder
and
mayhem in the darkened city have been shown to be wildly escalating
rumors.
Gunfights in the Superdome? Not a shred of evidence of this has been
produced.
In any case, it would have been pretty difficult since all those going
into
that giant holding pen were searched.

As
for the talk of turning New Orleans into “Little Somalia,” this refers
to the
U.S. military’s psychosis about the fiasco of the U.S. racist invasion
of the
African country of Somalia in 1993 (under the Democratic Clinton
administration) lyingly mythologized in Black Hawk Down. What
that
gung-ho movie did not show, of course, was the string of murderous
atrocities
committed against unarmed Somali civilians by the U.S. military before
outraged
resisters shot down two helicopters and killed 18 Army Rangers in a
fierce gun
battle in the capital Mogadishu. The American forces, enraged at being
defeated
by people they considered an inferior race, showed their cowardice and
depravity by murdering hundreds of unarmed Somali men, women, and
children. Now
the racist military officers want to avenge themselves for that
humiliation by
suppressing the black population of New Orleans. And they are backed by
the
government officials who issued “shoot to kill” orders against
“looters,”
referring to the flood victims trying to get water, food and diapers
from
waterlogged stores.

“These troops
are fresh back from Iraq, well
trained, experienced, battle-tested, and under my orders to restore
order in
the streets,” declared Democratic governor Blanco. “They have M-16s and
they
are locked and loaded. These troops know how to shoot and kill and they
are
more than willing to do so if necessary and I expect they will” (ABC
News, 2
September). While Washington expressed mild displeasure at Blanco’s
refusal to
hand over command of the Guard to the Pentagon, her blood lust seemed
to please
the feds. National Guard bureau chief Blum declared that the trapped
population
of New Orleans was violent and would be put down “in a quick and
efficient
manner.” The troops, Blum said, had just come from Iraq and Afghanistan
and
were “highly proficient in the use of lethal force” (Washington Post,
3
September).How many atrocities have
been committed by U.S. forces in New Orleans? Reporting is sketchy,
photographing of bodies is forbidden, and guns have been pointed at
reporters
who are too nosy.

But
all the talk of combat, insurgency and the reference to Somalia reveals
something more. In our article, “American Gestapo” (The
Internationalist No.
19, Summer 2004), we detailed the extensive planning by the U.S.
military for
carrying out “Military Operations on Urban Terrain” (MOUT) inside
the United
States. We noted:

“This
has pushed aside earlier doctrines on Military Operations Other Than
War
(MOOTW): the army isn’t just planning for ‘peacekeeping’ during ‘civil
disturbances’
in places like Los Angeles, they’re planning for war.”

A book-length study of
urban counterinsurgency tactics published by the Institute of Strategic
Studies
of the U.S. Army War College, titled Soldiers in Cities (2001),
cited
the fighting in Mogadishu as a prime example of “Recent MOUT Failures.”
The
authors lament: “the outcome of this battle represented a major
political
defeat for the United States, spelling the beginning of the end of U.S.
efforts
to stabilize the situation in Somalia.” The study pointedly notes that
“coincident with the end of the Cold War, the likelihood of U.S.
military
operations in the continental United States itself has also increased,”
and
that “the new national strategy of Homeland Defense gives the U.S.
military a number
of potential missions in cities and other urban areas within the United
States
itself.”

The
volume is a series of case studies of “urban warfare” from the
standpoint of
counterrevolutionary counterinsurgency: it studies problems the
Israelis
encountered in their 1982 occupation/destruction of Beirut, Lebanon,
reviews
the 1968 battles of Hue and Saigon in Vietnam, lists where the German
Wehrmacht
screwed up in the Battle of Stalingrad, etc. The chapter on the Los
Angeles
“riots” of 1992 following the acquittal of the racist cops who brutally
beat
black L.A. motorist Rodney King notes in particular the “significant”
“limitations” on police actions by federal troops by the Posse
Comitatus Act.
It is doubly significant, therefore, that in requesting that Louisiana
governor
Blanco hand over command of the National Guard to Washington, the Bush
administration asked her to federalize the Guard under the provisions
of the
Insurrection Act of 1807, which would remove such restrictions. That is
what is
behind the reference to mythical “insurgency” and “combat” in New
Orleans: the
feds ominously wanted to declare that an “insurrection” was under way
that had
to be suppressed.

A
Permanent Black Diaspora?

Survivors of
Hurricane Katrina trapped on Interstate 10 near the Superdome. When
they tried to cross over the Mississippi River bridges, racist cops
fired on them.(Photo: Irwin
Thompson/Dallas Morning News)

The
black population has been the prime target of internal repression since
the
republic was founded on the economic basis of chattel slavery. During
the
period of Radical Reconstruction following the defeat of the Southern
slavocracy in the Civil War, the freed slaves attained some genuine
democratic
rights. But after 1876 as the Ku Klux Klan nightriders sowed terror in
black
communities and rigid Jim Crow segregation was instituted. Louisiana
was in the
vanguard of states that passed laws declaring that “one drop” of “black
blood”
was enough to classify a person as “colored.” Limited gains were won
with the
civil rights movement in the 1950s and ’60s, formally outlawing most
forms of
legal segregation but doing nothing about the endemic poverty which
shackles
the black poor. Even those gains are constantly being eroded as schools
resegregate and the 1965 Voting Rights Act itself is under attack. In
the “war
on drugs” millions of black men have been jailed and permanently
disenfranchised. Democrat Clinton abolished “welfare as we know it,”
throwing
millions of black women into increased poverty.

Given the racist legacy of
American capitalism, past and present, in which black people have been
corralled into hellish ghettos, north and south, are hounded by the
cops, lack
access to quality education and health care, are “last hired and first
fired,”
it is not surprising that blacks have been victimized in the aftermath
of
Hurricane Katrina. Although New Orleans currently has a black mayor,
the local
rulers are infused with racism. In the home of jazz music and the Mardi
Gras,
the elite white “krewes” (Comus, Rex, Proteus, Momus) derived from
aristocratic
19th-century secret societies, tightly controlled the parades and
lorded it
over the black Mardi Gras “Indians.” When ordered to desegregate in the
early
1990s, most of them stopped parading but continued their exclusive, by
invitation, whites-only balls. Now the business elite is moving with
lighting
speed to remake the city by emptying out the ghettos and expelling the
black
poor.

What is looming is a
permanent
diaspora of New Orleans blacks.A clue
to the ruling class’s intentions for post-Katrina New Orleans was
revealed by
unofficial Bush administration mouthpiece David Brooks, in a New
York Times (8
September) column outrageously titled, “Katrina’s Silver Lining.” The
silver
lining for the capitalists, it seems, is the opportunity presented by
the fact
that Katrina “separated tens of thousands of poor people from the
run-down
isolated neighborhoods in which they were trapped.” Like the Bushes,
Brooks is
exultant at the idea that this government-enhanced disaster is turning
hundreds
of thousands of black residents into homeless evacuees, to be hunted
down as
looters or rounded up and deported to heavily policed “shelters.”
Brooks says
government must prevent them from ever coming back: “If we just put up
new
buildings and allow the same people to move back into their old
neighborhoods,
then urban New Orleans will become just as run down and dysfunctional
as
before.”

House
Speaker Dennis Hastert took some flak for saying too bluntly what large
sectors
of the American bourgeoisie thinks, sneering that restoring largely
black New
Orleans “doesn’t make sense” and that “It looks like a lot of that
place could
be bulldozed” (Washington Post, 1 September). That he
isn’t alone
in this was shown by the comments of James Reiss, head of the New
Orleans
Business Council. As head of the Regional Transportation Authority, he
was
responsible for seeing to it that city buses were not marshaled in an
organized
evacuation effort. Reiss got out safely just before the storm hit, and
then
choppered back a few days later – with Israeli security guards – to his
mansion
in the gated Uptown millionaires’ community of Audubon Place. While
tens of
thousands were still stranded on rooftops and in the Superdome, Reiss
organized
a secret conclave of business leaders in Dallas to work out the plans
for a new
New Orleans, “cleansed” of poor black people. Through the house organ
of American
capital, Reiss issued a threat on behalf of his class:

“The
new city must be
something very different, Mr. Reiss says, with better services and
fewer poor
people. ‘Those who want to see this city rebuilt want to see it done in
a
completely different way: demographically, geographically and
politically,’ he
says. ‘I’m not just speaking for myself here. The way we’ve been living
is not
going to happen again, or we’re out’.”–“Old-Line
Families Plot the Future in New Orleans,” Wall Street Journal,
8 September

Similarly, Washington
Post reporter and editor Joel Garreau wrote:

“The
city of New Orleans is not going to be rebuilt.

“The
tourist neighborhoods? The ancient parts from the French Quarter to the
Garden
District on that slim crescent of relatively high ground near the
river? Yes,
they will be restored. The airport and the convention center? Yes,
those, too.“But
the far larger swath – the real New Orleans where the tourists don’t
go, the
part that Katrina turned into a toxic soup bowl, its population of
400,000
scattered to the waves? Not so much....

“There
are a lot of black and poor people who are not going to return to New
Orleans
any more than Okies did to the Dust Bowl.”–Washington
Post, 11 September

Meanwhile,
Bush cronies in companies like Halliburton, Bechtel and Fluor
Corporation are
cashing in, with huge no-bid contracts ranging from $100 million to
$500
million. On FEMA’s recommendation, some of the donated aid money has
been
flowing into the coffers of “Operation Blessing,” run by Pat Robertson,
the
ultra-right-wing religious fanatic who recently called for the U.S. to
assassinate Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez. Robertson, it may
be remembered,
together with fellow zealot Jerry Falwell hailed the 2001 attack on the
World
Trade Center as god’s punishment on New York gays and abortion-rights
supporters. Robertson is notorious for looting his “charities,” having
spent
$500,000 in donations on a jet he used to visit his African diamond
mines, and
channeling half of all donations to his Christian Broadcasting Company.
And the
rightist Heritage Foundation is helping (for a hefty fee) develop the
government’s recovery plan, calling for waiving environmental rules,
eliminating
capital gains taxes and permitting private ownership of public school
buildings.

“Crony
capitalism,” it turns out, doesn’t just sprout in semi-colonial
countries like
Indonesia. The Bush gang are not only bloody-minded imperialist
warmongers,
depraved mass murderers, front men for a sinister military-industrial
complex,
hypocritical Christian bigots and scions of a capitalist robber baron
who
helped finance Hitler (Prescott Bush), they and their ilk are also
deeply
corrupt. The idea that conservatives are for “small government” is a
myth to
keep the small-town Chamber of Commerce businessmen of Main Street
politically
tied to the financiers of Wall Street who bleed them dry. All these
corporations live off the public trough, and their political
representatives
loot the “public” till with abandon. Just drive around northern
Virginia some
time to see all the estates and McMansions built by right-wing
“consultants”
with the proceeds of their lucrative “cost-plus” government contracts.

The
corruption, lies and cronyism are what most of the liberals and
reformist left
focus on in their comments on the New Orleans catastrophe. More far-out
types
focus on conspiracy theories (maybe Bush ordered the planes to hit the
World
Trade Center, was there a plane at all at the Pentagon, what about W’s
bin
Laden connection, etc.). What they have in common is that they seek to
discredit the Bush regime within the political framework of
bourgeois
politics. Most fundamental, however, is the fact that, from Iraq to
Louisiana, the government acts as the “executive committee” of the
entire
capitalist class. Democrats and Republicans may have disputes over
which one is
too “soft” in going after the current nemesis (Iraq’s Saddam Hussein
yesterday,
North Korea’s Kim Jong Il tomorrow), over whether tax cuts are
“reckless” or
the Iraq invasion “ill-prepared.” But they all seek to further the
interests of
U.S. imperialism, which is the greatest threat to working people around
the
globe and the future of humanity.

Troops patrol Grand
Central Station in New York, April 2004. New Orleans lockdown is dress
rehearsal for police state measures in the U.S. Imperialist war abroad
means racist repression “at home”! (Photo: New York Times)

While
various reformist pseudo-socialists call on the government to “do more”
for the
hurricane victims, calling for “money for relief, not for war,”
revolutionaries
respond that this is not a matter of “priorities” but of class
interests.
Communists do not call to “bring the troops home” to send them to New
Orleans,
but to drive the U.S. out of Iraq and defeat the
imperialist
occupation. Indeed, the example of Hurricane Katrina, where troops
were
“brought home” and then used to impose martial law on black New
Orleans, is a
perfect example of what is wrong with reformist “troops out” slogans
which
appeal to imperialist liberals who want to cut their losses in Iraq in
order to
focus on other “priorities” such as “disaster relief.” In the 1960s,
liberals
and reformists called to “bring the troops home” and “send them to
Selma,”
supposedly to defend civil rights protesters. But in reality, U.S.
troops were
sent into Little Rock, Arkansas and Birmingham, Alabama not to defend
blacks
but to put down incipient black rebellions against racist terror!

Authentic
communists seek to mobilize the mass of the exploited and oppressed
against
their exploiters and oppressors, fighting for a class
opposition to the
rulers who are laying waste to Iraq and are responsible for the
devastation
visited on New Orleans. We have called for the tens of thousands of
black poor
and working-class families who have been deprived of their homes and
livelihood
to march on Washington on a class-struggle program. There must be a
fight to
rebuild New Orleans in the interests of those who with their toil make
the city
run. The ruling class wants to to line the pockets of racist Uptown
magnates,
the California and Texas megacorporations who live off juicy government
contracts, the Arkansas retailers who milk profits from slave labor,
and the
New York banks who will make billions in interests on the loans that
will be
floated to pay for the reconstruction bonanza. We demand a massive
program
of public works, hiring the jobless at full union-scale wages and under
workers
control, to provide social services and decent housing, free of cost,
for every
single family driven from New Orleans.

Demands
must be raised as well to cancel the debts of all flood victims.
Otherwise they will not only be left without homes and jobs but will
also be
thrown into permanent penury by the relentless grinding of the
capitalist
market. As city rulers use the absence of hospital facilities as an
excuse to
prevent New Orleans residents from returning, there should be a
mobilization to
provide free quality medical care to all. Accept the offers of
aid from
Cuba and Venezuela! Let in the hospital units that FEMA kept out!
Expropriate
the private hospital corporations! While Bush & Co. use the Katrina
disaster to push vouchers and private schools, there must be a fight
for high
quality public education under teacher-parent-student control. The
entire
workers movement along with civil rights organizations and all
defenders of
black rights and democratic rights should mobilize for the right of
return
for the entire displaced population of New Orleans. Thiswill
be a
potentially explosive confrontation that comes directly up against the
U.S.
imperialist drive toward a police state.

After
the last hurricane thousands of Mexican and Central American workers
provided
the back-breaking labor to rebuild. While untold numbers of
“undocumented”
immigrants have had to flee from New Orleans, staying away from
shelters for
fear of deportation, defenders of labor, minority and immigrant rights
must
demand full citizenship rights for all immigrants. To defend
the victims
of the Katrina disaster from being victimized again in the
reconstruction, councils
of working people and residents of poor neighborhoods should be
formed. Blacks
and working people across the country have the power to repulse the
onslaught
against the hard-hit population of New Orleans. This racist attack,
like the
war on Iraq, has been unleashed by both capitalist parties. To defeat
it, it is
necessary to break with all the bourgeois politicians and fight to
build a revolutionary
workers party.

To
avenge the deaths of the brothers and sisters, the mothers and fathers
that the
ruling class left to die, to achieve genuine social equality and a
decent life
for blacks and all working people, we will have to get rid of this
whole rotten
system. Capitalism is racist to its core, and the struggle against
racism must
therefore be a struggle against capitalism. Organizing each group of
the
oppressed on a narrow sectoral basis only aids the class enemy, the
rulers who
seek to keep us divided. Only a revolutionary, internationalist workers
party
can organize and lead the oppressed to victory by sweeping away the
capitalists
and establishing a socialist society based on the principle of
production for
use and not for profit. The Internationalist Group and League for the
Fourth
International calls upon all the oppressed to join in the struggle. Remember
New Orleans! Black liberation through socialist revolution! n